Trump’s “Obamagate” Obsession Finds a Friendly Audience on Fox

Coverage of Michael Flynn’s case got nearly twice as much airtime as coronavirus Thursday on Trump–favorite Fox & Friends, while the president accused his predecessor of corruption in a cozy interview on Fox Business.

Egged on by a Fox interviewer on Thursday, Donald Trump insisted that his administration is the victim of the worst government conspiracy in U.S. history, a likely preview of his reelection messaging strategy. “This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country,” said the president, adding that “people should be going to jail for this stuff,” remarks that Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo agreed with. “It is the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen,” she concurred.

Trump touched on coronavirus at the start of the interview, shifting his prediction last month on the U.S. death toll from below 100,000 to “over 100,000 perhaps,” a fairly safe bet as the U.S. has already surpassed 85,000 deaths. Despite months downplaying the threat and botching his previous predictions, the president still claimed victory. “In all fairness, [100,000 deaths] is at the bottom level of the scale,” he said. “We would have lost 2 million, lost more if we did it a different way.” But even as he discussed this “terrible” and “incredible” loss of life, Trump’s comments largely diverted from the pandemic and instead zeroed in on his “Obamagate” obsession and his short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn’s case.

Earlier this week, Trump struggled to define the exact scope of the supposed scandal despite hammering it ad nauseam. But at its core, the allegations claim Barack Obama conspired with then FBI director James Comey and the bureau’s counterintelligence investigators to sabotage his administration from the get-go, tying it to shady Russian figures and portraying his election victory as aided by a Kremlin interference scheme. “If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago—and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” said Trump in response to Bartiromo rattling off Joe Biden, John Brennan, and Comey as several Obama administration figures who may have received intelligence reports linked to the Flynn case, per a declassified list provided to Senate Republicans this week. “I’ll tell you, General Flynn and others are heroes, heroes, because what’s happened to them—they weren’t after General Flynn. They wanted him to lie about me...and hopefully a lot of people are going to have to pay.” However, in 2017, Trump was calling Flynn anything but a hero. “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies,” the president tweeted at the time. “It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” Trump went on to tell Bartiromo that “this was all Obama, this was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them.”

Indeed, “Trump and his allies are now telling a very different story” about Flynn’s exit more than three years ago, the New York Timesreported on Thursday. Prior to Trump taking office, Flynn had back-channel discussions with a Russian official after the Obama administration had announced sanctions against Russia for 2016 election interference, the FBI discovered when reviewing transcripts of intercepted calls, noted the Times. Flynn, who served a few weeks as Trump’s national security adviser, would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about those discussions, a case that Trump’s Department of Justice now wants dropped. “This case reeks of political influence,” former Brooklyn prosecutor Marshall L. Miller told the Times, suggesting the DOJ is “now trying to rewrite the law to erase the crime.”

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As the pandemic’s devastation continues, and with the November election just over five months away, Trump and his media allies have spent the past week intensely focused on so-called Obamagate, with the president incessantly tweeting and discussing it. On Monday, the president, after spending Mother’s Day sharing of Obamagate–related tweets, used the White House’s coronavirus presser to attempt to break down the conspiracy. “Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released,” he said. “And from what I understand, that’s only the beginning—some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks.” When pressed for an exact crime, the president eschewed specifics: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.”

Rather than explaining the details himself, the president has relied on pro–Trump media figures to do much of the talking—which he shares with his nearly 80 million Twitter followers. During Bartiromo’s exclusive interview, “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” received fewer combined mentions than “the FBI,” “Flynn,” and “Obama,” who left office over three years ago and has remained relatively quiet during his post–White House life. In following Trump’s messaging pivot over the past week, coverage of the pandemic on Fox News has declined more than 40% since its peak in early to mid-March, according to a Media Matters study. The progressive media watchdog also found that the president’s favorite morning show, Fox & Friends, allotted just over 35 minutes of its three-hour runtime to coronavirus coverage on Thursday, despite the outbreak continuing to take hundreds of American lives on a near-daily basis. (Flynn received nearly twice as much coverage on the show, Media Matters found).

The connection between Fox and Trump’s anti-Obama musings go deeper than coverage alone. In August 2019, the White House’s current press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, thanked Fox’s top host for “the work that you do every night,” telling primetime host Sean Hannity—who recently called for Obama to "testify” before Congress—that his show goes “a long way. It already has. We now have the Justice Department looking into the misdeeds of the Obama administration and look, if Joe Biden is the nominee, the Democrats really have a huge albatross around their neck ’cause he was right there in the center of all the wrongdoing we saw happen there.”